Modernist tulips also parallel modernism by providing a material canvas for extensive aesthetic experimentation--or enough of a parallel to keep this conceit in play. The departure from Kantian formalism in the aesthetic evaluation of tulips was decisive by the end of the nineteenth century. Heretofore, the criteria for excellence in tulips were largely formalist. Dr. W. G. Hardy had written the seminal treatise, "On Perfection of Form in the Tulip," in 1847, wherein he took up the gardening cudgels against those who disagreed that the half-sphere was the perfect form of the tulip blossom (TT, 232-7). Complex mathematical equations subtended the raging arguments regarding the beauty of tulips--whether their beauty inhered most in the straight-on frontal view, or when seen from above looking down into the cup of the tulip, required alternative calculations of sublime mathematical precision; petal depth in relation to diameter offered a Platonic calculus of tulip Form. Modernist tulip genres abandoned all such aesthetic numerology and the formalism beneath it. The great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll began suggesting, as of 1899, that avant-garde gardens contain beds of multiple tulips chosen so that their colors modulated in finely-tuned colorscapes--for example, "the blackish-purple Faust tulip" shifting to a lighter and redder variety, bronzes shading into purple-tipped copper, and flame reds coexisting with crimson in a fauvist riot. 4 With such a colorist's eye, mass tulips could still be differentiated as spectacle; Jekyll's Saussurean langue of tulips insisted that their value was always diacritical, a matter of their relation to the other tulips in the bed. Jekyll and other modern greats of the English garden established a modernist garden practice, eschewing essentialism and "the old stable ego of [tulipine] characters" in favor of fluid, nonlinear, and self-reflexive gardening techniques. 5 Gardens were to be shaped with verbal and visual allusiveness: Jekyll's tulips entered into a modernist compact in which their most prized attributes, their individual characteristics, were set afloat in a collage-iste sea of quotation, reference, and countermemory.
On the other hand, the beauty of modern tulips was also a social construction, contingent on the material context of their viewing. The gleaming radiance of the 30,000 Silver Hawk white tulips displayed in the Sheffield Botanical Garden dazzled spectators thanks to the coal mining strike then in progress; their unbesmirched whiteness was the direct result of lowered smoke in the city's atmosphere, and depending on the political point of view, veritably radiated governmental perfidy or the strength of the labor cause (TT, 271).
The swerve toward massification in outdoor displays of tulips was accompanied by its opposite: the very modernist vogue for tulips displayed indoors as cut flowers, destined for vases and bouquets. Oscar Wilde was among the first writers to bring the cut tulip into his textual mise-en-scène; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, tulips in the drawing room hang their heads over the rim of blue and white porcelain vases from Japan, the visual trope of decadent modernity. 6 The tulip had rarely been contemplated before in its decapitated state, sundered from its invisible bulb, until its bizarreries suddenly made the indoor tulip visible, and au courant. It is almost frightening on this score to search out floral references in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so profuse and pervasive do they prove to be. 7 Almost every page is rampant with blooms. To inventory them with an eye to tulips requires sharp critical pruning. In film theory a distinction is made when discussing the sound of a film between diegetic sound and the film's score or sound track. Diegetic sound refers to sound or music emanating from something in the scene, such as a song being played on a car radio, while the score or sound track comes from "outside" the scene or narrative, superimposed upon the visual images. Woolf's writing is rife with "diegetic" flowers--characters fill vases, sniff bouquets, peer into garden blossoms, purchase flowers, and sell them--yet flowers, petals, blossoms, gardens are the green fuse that drives her language: sinuous vines and proliferating blossoms are Woolf's primary metonymies. Mrs. Dalloway hypostatizes flowers, and almost obsessively specifies them. Among those mentioned diegetically or as glimmering metonyms are roses of all colors and kinds, including hallucinated red roses on Septimus's wallpaper, dahlias, sweet pea, violets, hollyhocks, lilies, syringa, blue hydrangeas, orchids, pampas grass, purple heather, moss, carnations, lilacs, delphiniums, iris--and one and only one mention of tulips, as follows: "It was her nature to enjoy. . . . She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment." 8 So Peter Walsh muses about Clarissa's character. The sight of the tulip bed triggers her enjoyment, but provides an occasion for her to illuminate the world for someone else. The tulip bed she gestures towards is a shared visual spectacle that the massified modern tulip synecdochizes perfectly. Even these almost throwaway lines about the tulip bed are significant in a novel so bombarded with the language of flowers, if one pauses for a bit of textual spadework around the flower's edge. One common critical notion about spectacle follows Guy Debord's determinist analysis in The Society of the Spectacle: that is, spectators are in thrall to spectacle, and their thralldom is commodified as an act of consumption. 9 But Mrs. Dalloway as a whole will have none of this fixed economy of the spectacle, which Clarissa and others cut against repeatedly. Clarissa's expressed delight over the sight of the tulips nudges Peter Walsh into a moment's shared reverie. The modernist tulip bed is a commodified spectacle that dissolves and deliquesces with the nudge of an elbow. Like the coin Clarissa throws into the Serpentine in an act of expenditure, so too do tulips work their tiny magic as a feature of her gift economy. Clarissa is too old-fashioned perhaps to have cut tulips in her home, but she tiptoes through the modernist tulips to dapple the sight of them with the wonder of her enthusiasm. Rather than providing an occasion of "shock," which the novel so amply limns as a corollary modern experience, the tulip bed spectacle provides a distraction, in Walter Benjamin's terms, one that in Mrs. Dalloway's gift economy is only a proper distraction when disproportionately shared. 10
Seventeenth-century Tulipomania and the South Sea Bubble affair of the eighteenth century are retrospective instances of speculative frenzy reaching the level of the sublime, or at least the sublimely hysterical; the modernist tulip market I speak of doesn't have the gossamer sublimity of those bubbles, but instead the gritty, embedded materiality of the smutty foam that delineates a port's edge. Tulips no longer waxed and waned in value overnight, nor were single bulbs hoarded as species of gold. Financial speculation is an iridescent bubble in much modern socioeconomic theory, whereby the airy liquidity of intangible speculative value is privileged for its very vulnerability to the surface tensions that cause it to pop--yet one more demonstration of the mysteries of commodity form, and the contradictions of capitalism. 11 Modernism as a cultural icon, or bubble, or iconic bubble, to oxymoronize, does not resemble the feeding frenzy of past Bubbles or manias, when capitalism was in doubt as a world system, nor does it bob up and down in the waters of a singular "market." Bursting modernism's bubble becomes necessary, all the more so when our own frantic critical splashing tries to make one large bubble come to the surface, even if it be a cluster of bubbles with the adjective "new" on its label. That is to say, we as critics and scholars of modernism have to recognize our own resemblance to the Royal National Tulip Society, insofar as we also attempt to keep hold of modernism and retain the right to award retroactive prizes to sportive modernist hybrids. The Royal National Tulip Society clung to its role as arbiter of tulip excellence, as it disavowed massified tulips, brand-name tulips, national and global tulip economies, modern spectacle, and the commercialization of tulip tourism. The parallel disavowals we make in our self-professed roles as arbiters of the new modernisms include purging modernist orthodoxy of formalism, tradition, hierarchies, social Darwinism, commercialism, bourgeois modernism, neo-imperialism, and totalization of all kinds, without seeing how much we rely on the modernist brand.
Modernism is a brand name. Coming from me, I should stress, that's a compliment. Brand names have all the complexity of the Hegelian hieroglyph, and they offer cultural space for the hierophantic, the necrophantic, and ideological ghosts of all kinds. A brand name is not prima facie a shill, a facade covering an empty sameness, a con game designed to persuade gullible consumers that identical items differ in kind due to their brand name. Brand names carve out a locus for social recognition or attention, yet also defy linear logic or cause and effect reasoning. Brand names are exquisitely sensitive diacritical registers; they are more than the sum of their parts, if those parts are taken to mean products, the ads for them, production, distribution, and consumption.  Brands are aesthetic, onto-politico-material agglomerates that live because, as with Tinkerbell, we have applauded them into reanimation. Brand names also can live a crepuscular existence, since twilight sleep or suspended animation is often preferable to expending a brand's waning spirit in a waste of shame--or killing it off. Modernism's brand name, as we know, lingered for decades in such a boring twilight sleep, etherized upon a dissecting table, or slumbering in a jar. Efforts such as the Modernist Studies Association, the "New Modernisms" conferences, and even a provocative journal devoted to , share credit for reawakening a slumbering critical and scholarly and aesthetic spirit--modernism's brand. Each has something to do with resurrecting and refurbishing a brand in advanced moribundity--at least in some parts of the world. And as with so many commercial brands, the modernist brand can only be resurrected by ironizing or implicitly denying its original cultural status. This is glorious and salutary in some ways, but should not be mistaken as gestures of pure cultural exhumation or backdated exoneration. Brand names are revived so that they can still be of use, can still move the goods. In marketing there is a name for this: rebranding. A return to modernism with a difference, and with a plural vengeance, as in "new modernisms," legitimately opens key debates, stages productive re-readings, and enacts agonistic language games of genuine import and ferocity. We cannot ignore, however, our own investments in modernism's speculative bubble. As revivers of its brand, a brand we cannot seem to do without, we re-brand ourselves as critics and theorists just as we rebrand modernist others.
Because these comments can easily be misconstrued as a tired version of the self-critical lament that "we're all complicit," or even worse in my book, that any mode of criticism, interpretation, or theory inevitably "appropriates" or "co-opts" something that doesn't belong to it, I'll harp perhaps unnecessarily on what I don't mean to say, by way of the now highly attenuated tulip analogy. Tulip growers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were not "complicit" with a grubby market in tulips worldwide, nor did they co-opt or appropriate authentic or indigenous qualities of tulips by forcing bulbs, hybridizing them, and finally creating tulip brands. The fierce competition between and among tulip fanciers, tulip state apparatuses, and imperializing tulip stratagems doesn't boil down to hegemonic violence, or not exclusively so. Within a churning roil of bubbles, among them such contingent and overdetermined elements as color intensity, royal patronage systems, the rise of the natural history museum, botany hobby kits, the predilection for British railway supervisors to dabble in passionate gardening, nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, little Englandism, the transformation of public space in the modern city, Dutch mercantilism, tourism, feminism, diplomacy, imperial competition, the brutal exigencies of colonialism and slave labor, beauty, the Eiffel Tower, and ad infinitum, the agglomerate bubble of the modern tulip market burbles to the surface.
As go tulips, so goes modernism. That is, its meaning is inseparable from its uses and its overdeterminations. A relatively common stance amongst those who would like to "make modernism new" leans away from the so-called "high modernist canon," and tilts toward lesser known or even unknown modernist artists to escape what appears to be the cul-de-sac of high modernism. Exorcising the modernist canon posthumously, these critical acts of purification disregard the modernist branding that, like Sherwin Williams paint, covers everything, even criticism and critique. Those nouveau modernist critics who wish to enlarge the modernist canon, so to speak--and already the terms "modernist" and "canon" and "enlarge" beg too many questions to address here--had better hope that the illusion of a modernist or high modernist canon stays in place, to permit rebranding along the edges of a very big tent.
Another and to me better frame for the reappraisal of modernism I pluck from the resonant, splendid critical opus of Ernst Bloch, resurrecting a term he himself had borrowed, in both cases of borrowing to infuse it anew. In the essays collected together as The Utopian Function of Artand Literature, 12 Bloch cites "colportage," a real word that historically referred to the practice of travelling booksellers who crisscrossed Europe and elsewhere from the sixteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, selling novels, medical tracts, romances, scientific pamphlets, calendars, fairy tales, political documents, sermons, housewifery manuals, adventure tales, pornography, and prayer books at market fairs, from wagons, on the street, or house to house. Colporteurs, then--and the phrase unfortunately has nothing to do whatsoever with Cole Porter--in their meandering commercial travels gathered up, collected, and retailed the chaff and the wheat, the flotsam and the jetsam, the cream and the skim milk of published material of their moment. By means of colportage books and publications that belonged to completely different discourses, market niches, and even ontological levels were thrown together; in their array constituting more than the sum of their inventory. Cheek by jowl, their presence a matter of contingency as much as supply and demand, the colportage stocks taken as a whole offered, via commercial exchanges, an experience of "the Novum, the startlingly and unexpectedly new," (UF, xxxvii). The Novum, to follow through on Bloch's densely mystical yet materialist concept, is a concrete manifestation which orients people, even by way of monetary transactions, toward the wild horizon line of pre-illumination, or Vorschein (UF, 41, 73-7). In Bloch's thought colportage becomes a philosophical, political, and aesthetic category simultaneously, and its place on the plane of analysis is similarly multiple--colportage is a process yet also a realization. Capable of referring to the plenum of genres and imaginative documents--including the ideologically dubious--set forth into the world by colportage, that is, colportage as both a verb and a noun, colportage is also a metacategory, a manner of regarding representation in its social, political, and aesthetic dimensions all at once. There is much that is reminiscent of Benjamin's notion of "profane illumination" in colportage, but Bloch applies no ideological litmus tests to the contents of colportage. The more Brechtian Benjamin of "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," for instance, evaluates the products of mass culture ideologically, and finds them wanting in all but future potential. 13 Colportage in a Blochian sense occupies or engenders a site of anticipatory meaning. This vestibule of pre-illumination is neither the endlessly displaced abyss or black hole of meaning, as more recent post-structuralist thought would have it, nor, although it is dialectically informed, is colportage a form of negative dialectics. Theodor Adorno's crystalline rejection of shabby and impure genres, tainted with commerce, whereby true art must exist as the dark side of the cultural moon, makes him virtually the anticolporteur. 14
I am inching toward an assertion that colportage, like the modernist tulip market but less facetiously, is a remarkably helpful way to envision the ductile "thing" we cart around from place to place, put on exhibit, preach to and preach from, closing the doors upon certain display cases, rearranging the merchandise within, colporteurs all. Modernism is as baggy and capacious and eclectic as those motley wares of colportage, gathered together because of historical contingency, circulated, and sold. It is far more modernism's link to the Vorschein, or anticipatory illumination, that makes the term apropos. Bloch would probably have none of this conceit, as it runs the risk of including "false illusion" or kitsch along with the colportage; as he wrote, "the dream of colportage is: never again to be trapped by the routine of daily life," (UF, 83). On the other hand, colportage gives me a vivid conceptualization of and for modernism, especially as it is put to use in cultural and academic circulation. Bloch's insistence on the relevance of qualitative judgments within the precincts of colportage and its often disdained genres, as in art generally, is an aspect of his critical thought I am not willing to do without vis-à-vis modernism. In many instances, the return to modernism as a site of study and reconceptualization entails critical theories and assumptions where value not only plays no role, but cannot be countenanced as anything other than an invidious "distinction of taste," in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase. 15 By other lights value smacks of a thinly veiled plot to reinstantiate hierarchy, elitism, or transhistorical, universal values. Bloch's thought, like Benjamin's and that of numerous others, points us to the fire escape exit from those egregious simplifications of "value" and aesthetics, the bonfire of the vanities. Bloch reorients criticism to values in time and of time. His privileged use of the word "now" (Jetzt) reveals the stakes of discriminating value as both "new" and "now":
The now [Jetzt] moves and propels itself through each day, whenever. It knocks in all that happens, with its shortest time span, and it knocks on the door. But not every present opens up for it. The actual impulses, the socially driving pulses, do not knock in each present fresh and vital. Not every time opens up for the now and the next now that stands exactly at that moment in front of the door and that has never "entered" before. It has not unloaded its true contents with which and toward which it is on its way. [UF, 215]
Discriminations or judgments of value are being made all the time, and are operative in every sphere, every genre, and at every level. Judgments of value that spring from a colporteur's intellectual valise arise from a mental economy of abundance, not scarcity, from a sense of the possible, not measurement, and with an absolute lack of shame about expressions of pleasure, emotion, and wonder. Bloch's colportage is predicated on the unpredictable knock of the present on the door. More than that, though, colportage contains a critical ethos of appreciation we can best appreciate in textual performance. Colportage is thematized and indeed enacted in Joyce's Ulysses, as in his other works, with Finnegans Wake perhaps the most sustained spiritual act of colportage ever attempted on behalf of a Europe plunging into war. Leaving that to one side, one need only look at the encounters Joyce stages for his characters within Dublin colportage circa 1904. 16 Leopold Bloom is the very re to whom Bloch might be referring in saying, "the age-old pleasure of people, in no way simple and no way decadent, is preserved in the fair, wanders within it and without," (UF, 182). Bloom is surely a re for the modern consumer--as is the entire cast of Ulysses and its readers too--yet his immersion in the artificially protracted colportage of Dublin's colonially-depressed economy transforms him into a species of colporteur. He shores its fragments not against his ruins, but as a zone of fierce intellectual inquiry, passionate political imaginings, and intense, pleasure-laden evaluation of the most utopian sort. Colportage is bricolage to the third power: no mere act of magpie borrowing and collection, colportage is materially invested, rife with judgments of value that hinge on hope and transformation. Above all, colportage is a site of the Novum. "Make it new" is a familiar formalist credo to be found on modernist colportage's collapsible shelves. The Novum or newness lying immanent in colportage, however, is transformational, affective, collective, and interactive illumination. It emanates not only from the work or artifact made new, but from the rich possibilities for newness, for Vorschein, to be found in the pages of its disparate volumes, many of them old, tattered, and shop-worn. Bloom strolls into the bookstall to find himself pricked by this sense of newness; the Novum knocks on his door.
"Mr. Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle's Masterpiece. . . . He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
--That I had, he said, pushing it by.
The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
--Them are two good ones, he said. . . . He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain. [U, 193]
When the shopman returns, replete with "oniony breath, phlegmy cough, rawskinned bald spot" and all, Bloom has made his choice and holds it up, numinous, before him. The shopman lifts rheumy eyes and intones: "--Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That's a good one" (U, 194).
And in some odd way they are all "good ones." Modernism inevitably contains its trash masterpieces, as it does its "classics." Bernard Shaw made a similarly colportagist point when he insisted that people require a steady diet of "trash" along with their masterpieces. The colportage stall of modernism doesn't privilege a canon--for canons are, after all, the illusory aftereffects of inclusion, not exclusion, where canonicity produces more works, rather than fewer--but it certainly makes distinctions, ever shifting, about which works it makes sense to envision in relation to one another, which works give off sparks of elective affinity, which works look different given what rests on the shelf above or below them. The high/low distinction crumbles away, and with it the need to tidy the wagon or purge the bookstall. This is a modernism in and of the market, but clearly colportage as a historical social practice involves buying and selling within a complex niche or facet of "the" market, a niche sedimented with earlier practices such as barter, coffeehouse information exchange, and clandestine or "black market" elements built in. If possible, imagine modernism's brand name as if it were a plaque or blazon or handpainted sign on a colportage wagon, booth, or stall, a brand reprinted on all the contents of this unclassified and unclassifiable collection.
Yet the harrowing, dystopian exigencies of colportage are on display in Ulysses. As much as the colportage bookstall is capable of cracking open the golden bowl of the now, so too the fissures of class and gender and race and colonial status striate its space. Stephen and his sister, Dilly Dedalus, chance to meet at a bookcart, where each has headed for a private quaff of colportering. Stephen's eye passes over assorted titles: "Tattered pages. The Irish Beekeeper.Lifeand Miracles of the Cure of Ars.Pocket Guide to Killarney." Too mixed and motley for Stephen's interest to be piqued--although as the titles of real books, they are colportage squared by virtue of their hidden significance to the text in progress--and too reminiscent of the three masters he must disavow, his sister Dilly's book choice, a "one-pence Chardenal's French primer," is for her the Novum incarnate. "Is it any good?" she poignantly asks the brother who is newly returned from a Paris she is unlikely ever to see (U, 199-200).
In the whirling dervish of a chapter, "Circe," where all that has passed is recapitulated before a reader's eyes, Bloom is temporarily elevated to the highest position of civil and spiritual authority. After he declares "the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future," his bodyguards practice colportage as miracle by distributing not only the obligatory free loaves and fishes, but also "cheap reprints of the World's Twelve Worst Books" (U, 395), each of which echoes a chapter of the book: "Froggy & Fritz (politic), Care of the Baby (Infantilic), 50 Meals for 7 & 6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth? (historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant's Compendium of the Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser's Vade Mecum (journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who's Who in Space (astric), Songs that Reached our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's Way to Wealth (parsimonic)" (U, 396).
The colportage modernism I am trying to articulate puts a premium on both intention and reception--on value as an affective and a cognitive judgment intertwined with pleasure, hope, and politics--and on the diacritical relation between and among artifacts of modernism, in their moment and ours. A few years back I could never have written the word "intention" as anything but a critical epithet, and even now I invoke it neither Hirschianly nor in Benn Michaels-ese, that is, in the voices of two critics who made intentionality a platform of antitheoretical textual analysis. 17 Intention in my critical playbook doesn't refer to a mythical inner intention on the part of an author to give a specific meaning to a work overall, or any of its parts, a meaning affixed there like authorial crazy-glue. Instead, I'm trying to offer intention as a dialectical relationship, a way of capturing conceptually the agency involved in tilting a work or an artifact or a critical text toward the social, political, aesthetic, affective, cognitive, and cultural context of its reception. For example, by this definition of intention Joyce intends that Ulysses offer an analogous version of the bookstall placed within its chapters, so that as readers hold the book in their hands they are inevitably repeating the distracted colportage encountered in the text, sometimes literalized as in Stephen and Dilly and Bloom's bookstall moments, sometimes traceable only in the colportage whiffs given off by Ulysses's language. Its collection of styles, quotations, allusions, data, historical fact, and transgressions animate the Novum. Bloom's daily sojourns in the bookstall stage the possible, premonitory appearance of the new--a hope held out by the collision of his curiosity, yearning, and intense enthusiasm for change with an ideal constellation of books for sale that day, capable of allowing the present to knock upon the door. Modernist writers such as Joyce don't intend a single meaning or message, but do intend for their work to be received and consumed in dialectical relation to surrounding works, discourses, events, experiences, and so on--they intend the slant to the message, if you will. Resistance or transgression--our critical bête blanches these days--do not then lie in subtexts or hidden messages under the surface, nor even in the self-unraveling of language languaging: it's less a question of subverting a putatively hegemonic language, than of exposing more of the material surface of the new in order for the now to knock on the door. Modernism is colportage, then, but not all modernists are colporteurs, not by a long shot.
The sounds of gunfire attend the final critical example I add to the string of modernist allegories and conceits. Insurgent modernism is a shelf of the modernist colportagere, to coin a word, an intent within a work to push the Novum of awareness it entails to the foreground. I've echoed John Reed's classic book, Insurgent Mexico, in proposing yet another metonymy for modernism; the final re for exploration of modernism's bubble then and now arises from a relatively unknown modernist cinema, created along the U.S./Mexican border during the Mexican revolution against Porfirio Díaz and the U.S. military who aided his regime. 18 This cinema was produced in a meteoric arc by one Romaine Fielding, an actor and film director who as a star was associated with the Lubin Film Company, headed by Sigmund "Pop" Lubin, in Philadelphia. There was nothing obscure about either Lubin Films or Romaine Fielding in the silent picture era of 1910-5, prior to Hollywood dominance, when film companies roamed from Astoria, Queens to Philadelphia, to Arizona and the New Mexico territory and on to California; even D. W. Griffith's Biograph Film company made two films in a one-week stay in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1911. 19 Romaine Fielding, whose self-authored biography claimed an exotic Corsican birth and a link to Napoleon, was actually William Blandin of Riceville, Iowa. His huge popularity in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America and Mexico--for early film genuinely represented the international modernism of Raymond Williams's analysis--was demonstrated by his being chosen as the "world's most popular player" in the 1911 Motion PictureStory Magazine. 20 He won by several million votes over such still-resonant names as Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Pearl White, and Francis X. Bushman (NMH, 7). A consummate actor, Fielding was a tyro of writing and direction as well, and left the Lubin company temporarily to set up a film studio in Silver City, New Mexico. His intent was to make films in express sympathy with the Mexican revolution and its key res, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapáta, as well as pro-labor films supporting unionization of mine workers, both involving the unprecedented use of mixed Mexican, Chicano, and Anglo-American casts (NMH, 9). It now seems inconceivable that a film star and director of such widespread popularity in the U.S. and abroad could flaunt these pro-labor and antimilitarist stances in his insurgent modernist cinema, and moreover gain popularity as a result. Understanding the Fielding moment in modernism entails moving beyond a high/low split mentality, acknowledging intent on the part of its auteur, recognizing the popularity, pleasure, and spectacle inherent in this everyday modernism, whose achievement could not have occurred outside a branded, mass modernism without a shred of aesthetic autonomy.
The excitement about Fielding and his enterprise ran so high that the Albuquerque Journal wrote hundreds of adulatory pieces covering his work in Silver City, where he essentially commandeered the town, titling one such dispatch, "Romaine Fielding: A Revolution of Human Energy and Endurance" (NMH, 6). Among his oeuvre are films made in Santa Rita, New Mexico at the Chino Copper Mine, exposing the grotesque labor exploitation there, and inventing and celebrating a celluloid strike which became real later in the year when the actual copper miners followed cinematic suit. The audiences for these regionally-filmed and highly insurrectionary pictures were by no means merely local, or Southwestern--the films were circulated up and down the East Coast, and played to transfixed audiences in Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, and Spain, among other countries and colonies. Fielding titled one film centering on the struggle of the Mexican peasantry Los Insurrectos; he brought Mexican and Mexican-American actors and extras by the hundreds to small-town or ghost-town sites for vividly recreated skirmishes bursting with fire, explosions, and horses galore. The city fathers in Albuquerque, New Mexico's largest city, were so far from scandalized over this affront to U.S. government policy vis-à-vis Mexico and the labor unions--the cavalry and big capital were both called out--that they begged Fielding to relocate his fledgling studio there. But this radical municipal glory was not to be (NMH, 8). When Fielding left the Lubin Company to found Cactus Film Company, his fame faded and his company folded within a few years. On the whole, like W. C. Fields, he'd rather have been in Philadelphia.
Fielding's work endures, as does the historical record of its reception. His intention for these dazzlingly innovative movies--filming "on location," inventing special demolition effects--was to show what he called the "romance" of revolution and insurgency, to take the "Cowboy and Indian picture" and make it newly political (NMH, 12). To reach this goal, Fielding relied on a realism more exacting than his contemporaries were able to command: to enable his insurgent cinema vérité he was lavished with abandoned homes to blow up, sought after by eager extras and would-be desert starlets, gifted with derelict mine shafts and weary horses by a starstruck citizenry. Some may call this realism, not modernism, but I see it as modernist colportage, that is, the melding of genres and styles--documentary, reportage, romance, melodrama, westerns, adventure, political propaganda, etc.--to arouse emotional and intellectual intensity, and above all pleasure and wonder, in the spectacle of political transformation. Romaine Fielding of Riceville, Iowa is a vanished colporteur in modernism's colportage legacy. To recognize the existence of a vibrant and popular modernist cinema with an ideological and aesthetic twist that doesn't fit the dimensions of modernism's straitjacket is to recognize the limitations of our grasp of modernism and its possibilities, in its own time and ours.
We can rebrand modernism, or various modernisms, but we cannot recapture the Novum of particular texts, whether visual or verbal or auditory or choric, nor of politics, performances, movements, manifestos, and events, in the absence of modernist appreciation. Appreciation (read: valuing) has even less critical cachet and credibility than does intention, and for good reason--any return to literary appreciation or impressionist criticism or, God help us, to belletrism, would be a critical and theoretical disaster. But without passionate appreciation in the market sense critics and scholars cannot make the necessary rebranding of modernism anything more than an exercise. We have more than a little in common collectively with the Royal National Tulip Society; we are closer to the rheumy-eyed, onion-breathed bookstall colporteur, muttering "that's a good one," than we may wish to admit; we stand in lieu of Clarissa Dalloway directing others to "look" at modernist tulip beds; like Romaine Fielding, even our demolition jobs must be done with passionate intensity and spectacular flamboyance. Finding value prompts appreciation--that sentence can be read in an economic way and in a literary sense, yet is rarely taken as a speech act, an exhortation to express enthusiasm. "Enthusiasm," William Blake enjoins us, "is the all-in-all." Such enthusiastic appreciations of modernism can be (should be) rigorous, historical, aesthetically incisive, and politically aware all at once, yet without enthusiasm (even critique requires exuberance), the critical acts that float modernism's speculative bubble in the twenty-first century cannot permit us to experience modernism as a "tiger's leap into the past." 21 That is Benjamin's famous definition of fashion, yet it combines with Bloch's colportage to suggest something about leaps of critical enthusiasm: the tiger's leap is the same thing as opening the door upon hearing the knock of the now. We know that modernism and its myriad works did not redeem the world in the ways we would wish, and the impulse to reach back into the past of modernism and imagine that a re-branding act of criticism can change that is understandable, yet deluded. Like an eccentric sect that must rather embarrassingly go on about its daily business after its leader has misjudged the End of Days, we have to recognize that things are as they are. This is tautological, and yet also extraordinary.
Did modernism, of so many tulip stripes and shades, then fail? Is the critical act of floating modernism's bubble a doomed or tainted enterprise? No, and no, yet not in thunder. Echoing Wittgenstein as this essay also began, "the world is everything that is the case." 22 Modernism is and was the case in the world experiment, which in Bloch's critical humanism we are always embarked upon, the "world experiment" being the shared need to first recognize, and then change, the world. The modernist bubble of our speculations, set aloft by our appreciations as by our depreciations alike, enlarges the surface of what has been and might be the case, allowing modernism into our moment's world experiment, making modernism anew. In retailing modernism this way, we don't risk selling out--the only danger lies in failing to appreciate and give value, and thereby selling modernism short.
Jennifer Wicke is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Born to Shop: Modernism, Modernity and the Work of Consumption, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.Her essay is part of a new project on questions of value and aesthetic and political practices of evaluation.
1. The spirit of Wittgenstein's later work hovers over this essay, or I hope it does. The slab language game appears in his Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Prentice Hall, 1973), 4-6. I'd also like to thank Kevin Dettmar, Nico Israel, Lindsay Bell Waters, Scott Cohen, Rita Felski, Avital Ronell, Elizabeth Outka, Mokhtar Ghambou, and Michael Levenson for their sometimes unwitting but constant inspiration.
2. The tulip material in this essay is largely taken from the almost impossibly comprehensive and gloriously well-written study by Anna Pavord, The Tulip: The Story of a Flower that has Made Men Mad (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 1999); hereafter abbreviated as TT.
3. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). This book contains an astonishing discussion of the material and imperial vagaries of British textiles and Wedgwood.
4. Gertrude Jekyll so opines in her Home and Garden: notes and thoughts, practical and critical, of a worker in both (New York: Longman, Greens, 1900), 43-5.
5. My paraphrase of D. H. Lawrence's line, "we have lost the old stable ego of characters" apropos of the modernist novel, in his Psychoanalysis and the Unconcious (New York: T. Seltzer, 1921).
6. Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), borrows its tulips in chinoiserie vases from Huysmans's Au Rebours [Against the Grain, trans. John Howard] (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930) in the plagiaristic chapter eleven that inventories Dorian Gray's possessions and home decor, basing these on Des Esseintes's decadent property, tulips included.
7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harvest, 1987). For a crystallized version of the floral basis for Woolf's tendriling style, read her brief story, "The Lady in the Looking Glass," published in Harper's Magazine (December 1929), where the act of representation or mimesis unfurls in a garden espied only in a corner of a mirror glass (The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch et al., vol. 2 [New York: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999], 2461-4).
8. Ibid., 118.
9. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).
10. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-51.
11. Two books that treat financial bubbles and the modern market with special finesse are James Buchan's Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) and Edward Chancellor's Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). On the relation of modernism to the market in general, see the exciting collection introduced and edited by Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt, Marketing Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
12. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); hereafter abbreviated as UF. Zipes provides a very thoughtful introduction to this collection, an essay called "Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination." He translates the German Vorschein as "anticipatory illumination," and I follow his lead (UF, xi-xliii).
13. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, 155-94.
14. See especially Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
16. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986); hereafter abbreviated as U.
17. See E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) and Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
18. John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969).
19. Details of this extraordinary modernist episode are to be found in an excellent essay by Robert Anderson on early filmmaking in the state, "Early Filmaking in New Mexico: Romaine Fielding and the Lubin Company West," published as a monograph by The New Mexico Historical Review (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1975); hereafter abbreviated as NMH.
20. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989).
21. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, 261.
22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 3.
Because I do not hope to turn again . . .
T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday
Contrary to the expectations that might be engendered by its title, this essay does not concern itself in any way with unorthodox Marxist theories of history and society; nor does it so much as advert, except in this sentence, to any of the conflicts--1789, 1830, 1848--that made up the so-called "Age of Revolutions" in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. No, the subject of the present article conveys none of the drama and grand narrative sweep associated with those ideas and events, though like them it has, in its way, organized the experience of modernity. I am referring to the revolving door, an unsung but pervasive--dare one say pivotal--technology for modern living. It has been slighted by most historians of architecture, by philosophers of the modern city, by historians of the department store, and even, bafflingly, by Gretl Hoffmann's seemingly exhaustive Doors: Excellence in International Design,not to mention Val Clery's ruminative, phenomenological essay, Doors. 1 Yet certain artists, writers, and filmmakers were quick to discern the symbolic suggestiveness residing in, and the cultural work performed by, the revolving door. In a dazzling essay on "The Use of Analogy in Legal and Political Argument," Elaine Scarry takes the emergency hand brake found in railway passenger compartments as a "materialized locus of consent," pointing out that, since the brake is accessible to any passenger at all times and since pulling its lever actually causes the train to stop (it does not send a signal to the engineer, but directly intervenes in the vehicle's operation), it "has no equivalent within any other form of transportation." 2 For me, the revolving door is just such an incomparable modern mechanism, similarly dependent upon individual participation and similarly replete with significance. Consisting typically of three or four glass panels inside a circular frame, the revolving door multiplies the possibilities of its "inherently ambiguous" plate glass by using it to reconre the space and experience of the threshold. 3 We are inured to the revolutionary nature of this architectural miracle, inside of which material and location, glass and threshold--each in its way "a field on which the exchange between inner and outer occurs, a field reflecting the violation of space but also enclosing and protecting"--achieve a powerful interaction through a particular distribution of space and motion inside the revolving door. 4 This "inside of which" calls for comment, for the revolving door is, of course, the only kind of door that is also a chamber, so that one can speak of being "inside the door." This renders it fundamentally different from the humble turnstile on which it is based.
The revolving door was the creation of one Theophilus Van Kannel (of Philadelphia), who on 7 August, 1888, received U.S. Patent number 387,571 for what he called his "New Revolving Storm Door," and who the following year was awarded the Franklin Institute's John Scott Legacy medal for useful inventions. In recommending this award, the Institute's Committee on Science and the Arts noted that "persons passing through [the new door] pass as through an ordinary turnstile," but its members recognized that, in boxing up the turnstile, Van Kannel had transformed it utterly, turning it into something like a mechanical lung for controlling the circulation of air and bodies alike. "At each one third turn of the door," they noted, "a volume of air equal to the space between two arms and from the floor to the roof of the door, is pumped out from the room to which it is attached and a similar volume of air is pumped in." 5 Van Kannel first began producing his new invention through the Storm-Proof Door Company of Philadelphia, and his earliest testimonials come from Philadelphia restaurants, dry goods stores, clothiers, as well as the city's Chamber of Commerce. Writing on 30 August, 1888, J. T. Harker, manager of Thackray's Restaurant, celebrated the door in terms that made plain its transcendence of the open turnstile:
In the coldest days during the great blizzard, we felt no discomfort, as it [the door] completely excludes the strongest wind, even while persons are passing in or out. Aside of its effecting a great saving of coal, it makes the front of the room as comfortable as other parts, thus adding to the availability of seating room. I at no time found any trouble in its use, a solid stream of persons passing in, and another out, without collision, and with much more freedom than the old-style swinging doors I had in use. The absence of all slamming, and the exclusion of street noises, are also an important feature. 6
Starting in the 1890s, the Van Kannel door began to appear across both the architectural and the tropological landscapes of America. 7 By the second decade of the twentieth century it had become a symbol, even a synecdoche, of modern American city life. When, in 1916, Man Ray resettled in Manhattan after a stint in small-town New Jersey, he initiated the new urban, experimental phase in his career with Revolving Doors (1916-1917), a series of abstract collages hung on a hinged stand which spectators could turn as they wished. A spinning door might well have seemed a fitting emblem for modernity, since that condition was often described in terms of the "dizzying" changes it wrought upon traditional social orders, and since it was regularly evoked through images of rotation--Yeats's "gyres," Wyndham Lewis's "Vorticism," the chocolate grinder and orbiting bachelors of Duchamp's La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, and so forth.
Our habit of associating the revolving door exclusively with the fast-paced, skyscrapered American city, however, may obscure a certain ambivalence in its original conception and early promotion that can usefully remind us of the door's Victorian provenance. 8 It is true that Van Kannel himself sometimes addressed his public as an aggressive forward-thinker, disdainful of outmoded ways and means. In an early leaflet, the inventor somewhat irritably confronts the customary reaction to his door: "'Just like a turn-stile,' so say nine out of ten persons who first see it. As well may we say a tea-kettle is like a locomotive boiler." Much of the leaflet is characterized by just this sort of pugnacious modernism. "In the old way," Van Kannel recalls, "every person passing through [a door from the outside] first brings a chilling gust of wind with its snow, rain or dust, including the noise of the street; then comes the unwelcome 'bang!' This interesting programme is repeated in proportion to the number of callers. All these and many other annoyances are entirely obviated in the New Revolving Storm Door," since "[each] person passing through the door pushes any one of its four wings forward, the wing behind him arriving at the curved side wall before the wing in front leaves it." 9 As Reyner Banham points out in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Van Kannel's brainchild, which was initially marketed under the slogan "Always Closed," constituted an important step on the way "toward full control" of atmospheric conditions inside of buildings--in other words, toward the creation of spaces finally independent of nature's rhythms and constraints. 10
And yet the inventor betrays a hint of Victorian double-voicedness about this prospect, some portion of his sympathies hankering to retain connection to, or dependency on, seasonal cycles. Van Kannel envisioned that in normal use his door would have "solid or glazed wings during the winter season and gauze or lattice wings during the summer" ("MEPA"). The very idea of fitting out a revolving door with gauze or lattice must strike us--for whom the glass is a definitive feature, part of the door's cold, antihumanist appeal--as an atavistic absurdity, a misplaced piece of pastoral sentimentality. Still, one of the reasons Van Kannel gave why the wings of his doors had to be able to fold back and open a clear passageway was "to provide for the circulation of air in the event of . . . a suddenly warm day in the spring or fall, after the solid wings have been applied to the door" ("MEPA"). Like many another bourgeois Victorian, Van Kannel seems torn between the allure of the coming mechanical age and the currents of Romanticism still whispering the possibility of a natural humanity. His early fantasy--shocking to contemplate--that his invention might be installed not only in public buildings but in private homes as well is of a piece with the machine-age domestic architecture parodied in Waugh's Decline and Fall : even to think of imposing the revolving door upon the suburban domicile seems an act of modernist totalitarianism worthy of Waugh's Professor Silenus, who despises "all the thoughts and self-approval of [the] biological by-product [humankind]" and who believes that "the only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men." 11 The dream that the revolving door could be "an ideal entrance closure for residences" persisted in Van Kannel promotional materials for many years: a catalogue probably dating from the 1930s is still rather half-heartedly pushing the idea, even though no private residences are listed on the appended "Abridged List of Buildings Equipped with Revolving Doors." 12 But Van Kannel's ardent-modernist side eventually acquiesced to the residual Victorian ideology of sacred domestic space. The Van Kannel door may have been "Always Closed," but, as its inventor eventually began to emphasize, it was "Always Open" as well, and the keepers of the American home declined to open their domestic sanctums to this "mechanical paradox."
Another sign of the revolving door's late Victorian origins is to be found in the nature of the claims put forward about it. It is not simply that these claims are inflated, but that they are inflated in such a way as to endow the effort to promote the installation of revolving doors with a moral grandeur comparable to that of the great nineteenth-century reformist projects, such as Chadwick's sanitation campaign. Under the heading "WILL IT PAY?" Van Kannel's early leaflet declares that the new door "will [not only] in a short time earn its cost in fuel [for heating], but it will do what is of far greater importance. It will save life, by preventing those deadly lung and throat diseases which are sure to overtake the unfortunate salesman, cashier or clerk whose duty keeps him near the constantly opening front door" ("MEPA," emphasis in original). The rhetoric of the early Victorian better-ventilation crusades, with its "noxious effluvia" and "baleful miasmas," is not far below the surface of such a passage. As Chadwick had done for the rookery-denizens of 1840s London and Manchester, Van Kannel will do for the turn of the century's new subclass of shop clerks, whose members are on the front lines of commerce and cannot evade the perilous influences of the streets.
Given such rhetorical affiliations, it is not wholly surprising to see a latter-day advocate of the Van Kannel door place his discussion of its merits in the framework of a Victorian-style comparative, evolutionist and universalist anthropology. This is what Robert L. Blanchard does in his remarkable Around the World with Van Kannel (2nd ed. 1930), a text whose size and imaginative scope--it is nearly a hundred pages long and contains dozens of photographs of Van Kannel doors on location in several countries--make it something like the Golden Bough of promotional literature. Blanchard's text is no mere catalogue but a fanciful tour of the world, stopping off wherever significant exhibits are to be found. "No matter where we go," Blanchard writes, "over land or sea . . . we meet one familiar thing. An accouterment that traces its birth to the earliest pages of history--the doorway, or entrance." Warming to his theme, the author continues:
Doors have ever been a necessity to man. They have been in use, in one form or another, since the early days when our ancestors lived in caves. . . . Entrance has always been a problem for man to solve. So important has been the matter that door is the one word that remains practically the same in all the Aryan languages. But what a variety of doors have been used. 13
There then follow two-and-a-half pages of examples--bundles of furze, curtains of skin or cloth, slabs of stone, and so on--drawn from distant lands and times. All previous means of ingress are shown to have come into existence by the Middle Ages, but "thereafter, from medieval times down to 1890 . . . no step was taken to improve the usefulness of entrances" (AWVK, 9). The sorry state of doorway efficiency up to the end of the nineteenth century was damning evidence that "in one respect modern man had advanced but little from the cave-dweller" (AWVK, 81). Enter at last Van Kannel, with the invention--I quote verbatim here--"which completed man's emancipation from the dark ages!" (AWVK, 81).
Its product a prominent jewel in the crown of progress, its mission to spread that product's benefits around the globe, the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company as this sedulous scribe presents it stands in the vanguard--or at the doorway--of civilization. If you do not adopt the revolving door, Blanchard warns, "you place your health and your life, or the health and life of your customers at the mercy of the elements and in the hands of chance" (AWVK, 93). Van Kannel has answered the desire of the ages for an airtight domain of human liberty--"Always Closed"--where Chance and Nature cannot penetrate. A cartoon that opens and closes the volume ( 1) links the revolving door with the revolution of the earth itself, both of them turning us from old worlds to new, from determination by material forces to mastery over them, from beings "half-akin to brute" to wholly free makers and products of culture. 14
And yet darker energies than these have also gathered on Van Kannel's doorstep. Summing up the way Van Kannel's creation functions as an "environmental filter" by "admitt[ing] persons but not the wind," Reyner Banham writes that the revolving door "strangle[s] violent up-currents at birth." 15 The invention put an end to the phenomenon known as "stack effect," to which tall buildings having banks of elevators placed in a certain relation to the entrances were especially prone: rising elevators sucked conventional exterior doors inward, making them difficult to open from outside, and descending elevators blew them out--the building seeming to respire like a slumbering giant. But it is the recourse to violent metaphors like Banham's that concerns me here, a habit that has perhaps been encouraged, by the historic portentousness of thresholds: it is through a doorway that we see the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, over a gate that we read "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate"--or for that matter, "Arbeit macht Frei." Also contributing to this custom may be what Rem Koolhaas calls the "humanistic assumption" in Western architecture that there is a "moral relationship" between the exterior and the interior of a building and that "the 'honest' façade speaks about the activities it conceals." 16 Such an assumption makes the threshold a site for the practice of candor or cunning, plain-dealing or treachery and deceit; and it underwrites the tendency of Van Kannel advertising to envision the entrance to every public building as the stage for a morality play depicting the clash of Reason and Nature.
But there seem to be reasons beyond the traditional, more specific to Van Kannel's invention, for thinking of the revolving door as a strangely dangerous thing, a blend of beauty and menace that can take us places we may not want to go. In the recent film The Truman Show, the title character begins the painful process of unraveling his illusory world when, instead of entering his office building one morning, he spins the revolving door 360 degrees around and catches the actors and stagehands of his televised existence off-guard. However comforting it may be to contemplate the benefits conferred on humankind by Van Kannel's sealing off of the threshold, there can be something unsettling and disorienting about the experience of actually using the door--as if the new invulnerability of the building has been purchased at the cost of a new vulnerability for individuals. In Part VII of Hart Crane's The Bridge, the poet conducts his readers through a subway station and counsels them to "[a]void the glass doors gyring at your right, / Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright / --Quite unprepared rush naked back to light. . . ." 17 What is Crane afraid of? Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather provides a memorable answer in the sequence, late in the film, in which one of Michael Corleone's henchmen, reversing that Enlightenment spin which Van Kannel liked to place on his invention, stages the whacking of a competing [Begin Page 566] mob boss in the revolving door (. 2, 3). The new Don's hired gun follows his mark toward the revolving door and flips the lock atop the door's panels, shutting off Van Kannel's "stream of persons" and turning the fluidly spinning wheel into a glass cage--ultimately into a transparent coffin. The sequence gives us an exaggerated, gothic explanation for Crane's dread of being "boxed alone," however briefly, in this device that makes visible our vulnerability to assault.
If we consult the useful annotations in the American Law Reports (ALR) by Gregory G. Sarno and F. G. Madara on "Liability for Injuries in Connection with Revolving Door on Nonresidential Premises" and "Liability for Injury by Revolving Door," we must come away from the experience powerfully impressed by the wealth and variety of mishaps capable of occurring in and around this type of door. 18 Among the "contributing factors" to revolving door accidents which Sarno enumerates, one finds "location of door or nearby doormat or step," "use of opaque panels," "size of revolving door's compartments," "worn or defective friction strips or retarding devices," "collapsing of revolving door's wings," "improper use of directional signs or failure to provide warnings," "slippery or sticky substances on the floor in or near revolving door," and "other and unspecified causes" ("ALICRD," 138). The historical evolution of isolated incidents into a whole little class of legal proceedings can be charted by comparing the index to the 1st and 2nd Decennial Digests of American Legal Cases (covering 1685-1916), which contain only a subheading, "Door, revolving," and list two negligence cases, with the index to the 3rd and 4th Decennial Digests (1917-1936), in which "Revolving Door" has earned an entry of its own, under which to organize its ever-proliferating examples.
The decisions reached by American courts during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth tended to reinforce the idea inscribed in the revolving door's allotment of space, namely that while inside the door you are on your own. In Washington Market Co. v. Clagett, a 1901 case in which "the plaintiff [had] slipped on a pile of fish immediately after emerging from a covered revolving door leading into a market," the court held that while the proprietor was obliged "to keep entrances [to his market] in a reasonably safe condition," he was by no means "an insurer of the safety of the persons who come there" ("ALIRD," 1346). In the 1905 matter of Harris v. Cowles, the complaint charged the revolving door with being "particularly enticing to children of tender years," adding that the hotel in question had "fail[ed] to provide any apparatus to prevent the limbs or body of a person from being caught between the door's jambs and partition" ("ALICRD," 146). The ruling in favor of the defendant set a precedent by rejecting the idea that the revolving door could be classed with those special objects set aside as "attractive nuisances," for which property owners must assume responsibility even where (underage) trespassers are concerned. Traffic flow took precedence over other considerations: it was, the court said, "manifestly impracticable" to take the precaution of keeping the door locked, since "the purpose of this circular door . . . requires that it shall be subject to the uses of ordinary passage at any moment" (qtd. in "ALIRD," 1350). The 1937 case of Provo v. Toledo Trust reaffirmed this ruling: young Albert Provo had, to his cost, evidently drawn "the inference that the revolving door was to him a new toy with which to play." But the judge emphatically denied that the revolving door could be considered an "inherently dangerous instrumentality," finding that "if not defective, the possibility of danger inures in the manner of its use." 19
In these cases, the revolving door was playing its part in the evolution of tort law. The accidents taking place in or around it became occasions for testing the boundaries of those fuzzy categories of the "inherently dangerous instrumentality" and the "attractive nuisance," which contained the only recognized exceptions to the blanket indemnity then enjoyed by manufacturers and to the somewhat less spacious but still significant freedom from responsibility possessed by the proprietors of hotels, stores, and the like. The notion of an "inherently dangerous" product had originated in a New York case in 1852; afterward, as Prosser on Torts informs us, "for more than half a century . . . there was much pointless dispute . . . as to how such products as soap, chewing tobacco, or the container of a beverage were to be classified." 20 Prosser characterizes nineteenth-century courts as animated by a general "social viewpoint" that made them reluctant to impose "too heavy a burden upon manufacturers and sellers" by holding "them responsible to hundreds of persons at a distance whose identity they could not even know . . . It was better to let the consumer suffer." 21 Since direct agreement--or "privity"--had not taken place between makers and users, no contract was deemed to exist between them.
Benjamin Cardozo's decision in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. in 1916 virtually created product liability law ex nihilo, by identifying a defective product as an inherently dangerous one. In two cases in the years that sandwich that decision, the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company came as close as it ever would to the territory Cardozo was opening up. Both were proceedings in which, as in most cases featuring revolving doors, the complaints focused on "the rubber and felt strips . . . attached from the top of each wing to the bottom along the outer edge" ("ALIRD," 1350). In Buzzell v. R.H. White Co. of 1915, the department store in question was exonerated of negligence when it stipulated that, even though the strips were indeed worn down to such a degree that they did nothing to restrict speed of revolution, they were never intended to have such a function, but were simply seals to prevent heat loss. In his patent application, in fact, Van Kannel never raises the issue of velocity at all: for him, the strips "bearing against the inner faces of [the] segmental side portions of the structure," derive their rationale entirely from their function as guards against air leakage and, somewhat incidentally, caught fingers. 22 In Hochschild v. Cecil, a 1917 case about a sixty-eight year old woman who had "received a sudden blow from behind while proceeding cautiously through [a] store's revolving door," "a consulting engineer testified that the 'Van Kannel' door used by the store was what might be termed a 'pioneer,' but now 'obsolete,' type of revolving door which had been replaced by modern [versions] with stationary ceilings and more easily controlled momentum" ("ALICRD," 159-60). With the concept of manufacturer's liability in its infancy, however, the question of whether a revolving door can be considered defective, and hence an "inherently dangerous instrumentality," because it lacks any form of "spin control" remained a dead letter. Beefed-up strips were quietly introduced; a feature of later catalogues was the "Governing Device," which, it was asserted, "does away with the only objection to the use of revolving doors, i.e. spinning of the wings when a person goes through the vestibule in a great hurry" ("GENIN," 28; emphasis in original). These alterations were made not only to manage turn speed but to prevent backward, or clockwise, movement--a phenomenon that was to have painful results in more than a few instances, even though Van Kannel had said in his patent application that his revolving door would "preferably [be] provided at the top or bottom, or both, with a retaining pawl or equivalent device, so that said door can move in but one direction." 23 In Finch v. Horn and Hardart Baking Co., a 1928 Pennsylvania case that bore out the principle of respondebat superior, the automat was held liable for the action of an "employee who was coming out of the restaurant's revolving door just as [the] plaintiff was entering, [and who] suddenly retraced his steps and went back into the room the way he had come, causing the door to revolve backwards and to knock the plaintiff onto the restaurant's floor" ("ALICRD," 148-99). No liability was attached to the manufacturer of a door capable of being misused in this way.
It would be misleading to suggest that people have shown a greater propensity to harm themselves, or others, in revolving doors than they have done in or with any number of other objects. But the injuries sustained and the fear aroused by revolving doors has much to do with the fact that they place two or more people in a form of relationship not created by any other apparatus for the movement of bodies through space. In the revolving door, strangers who are visible to, yet partitioned off from each other are obliged to act not merely courteously but collaboratively, choreographing their movements by silent agreement so as to ease the passage of both to their opposite destinations. What ought to occur is a model in miniature of the well-functioning civil polity, a system of cooperative strangers and an equilibrium of individual interests: the enterer's desire for ingress is presumed to counterbalance the exiter's for egress, and the revolving door is supposed to effect "the simultaneous passage of one stream of persons in and another out with freedom and comfort" ("MEPA," emphasis in original). Furthermore, the revolving door gives concrete shape to a vision of society in which the individual is, as Rachel Bowlby puts it, "the only significant social category." 24 Larger social units, such as the family, do not re in Van Kannel's calculus: this was a man who, when he thought of the future, thought first of the 21st-century "boarding house," an institution that exists to serve a population of unattached urban males. 25 In place of that absent privity between manufacturer and user, the revolving door substituted an unspoken pact among its isolated users to ensure the smooth operation of the mechanism and the safe passage of all parties. Anyone unlucky enough to step into the revolving door at the same instant that a homicidal maniac, a staggering drunk, or just a very incompetent schlemiel, was entering it from the other side was certainly to be pitied, but such a person would have no legal recourse against Van Kannel--even though dependency upon the other and inability to flee are built into the design.
Just as Cardozo was making legal history with his decision in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., another visionary was developing his account of a world centered on the revolving door and operating on principles utterly different from those of Van Kannel's libertarian utopia. Working in his scriptless, experimental manner, Charlie Chaplin did not hit upon the notion of using a revolving door to provide the engine of mayhem for his 1917 short film "The Cure" until take #77. Once he had glimpsed the device's comic possibilities, however, Chaplin went about constructing his film according to the method characteristic of all his early comedies: "Every one of them," said an early reviewer, "is built around something." 26 "The Cure" makes this principle plain for all to see, since Chaplin, flying in the face of premises liability case law, has decided to install his inspirational prop smack in the middle of a spa courtyard, perilously close to the pool of medicinal waters. He has also opted for that "pioneer" model of the revolving door that is capable of spinning rapidly in either direction. It is only a matter of time before he starts inflicting all manner of injury upon the prodigiously bandaged appendage of Eric Campbell and discharging pursuers headlong into that pool ( 4). Every hilariously bruising relationship Chaplin creates in and around the revolving door is derived from the repressed unconscious of Theophilus Van Kannel. Ultimately, the circular movement of the Van Kannel door becomes more than just the motive force of Chaplin's slapstick: it becomes a re for his comic genius, the signature or promise of an endless capacity for ludic invention.
Lawyers filing suit against the proprietors of premises on which revolving door accidents occurred frequently invoked the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, considering those proprietors responsible for keeping all mechanisms on their properties in safe working order. Promisel v. Hotels Statler Corporation of 1934 went in favor of the plaintiff because the glass in one panel of the door had been temporarily replaced with a wooden board, which blocked a woman's view of the man who was on his way out as she prepared to step in: "the court declared that . . . the opaque board created a danger in the use of the revolving door which made it defective" ("ALICRD," 157). But proprietors were in the clear when no such defect was discernible and the door "was operated and controlled by an independent third party whose unusual method of operation . . . was the proximate cause" of the injury ("ALIRD," 1349-50). 27 Only in rare cases such as the 1938 affair of Schubart v. Hotel Astor did a court sustain a complaint against the proprietor of a premises that featured a revolving door in good working order. In this instance the court found that it would have been reasonable for the hotel to post attendants on the doors on the particular Saturday evening when an elderly woman was injured in them, because it was the evening after the big Army-Notre Dame football game, and a group of Army fans "in a gay, hilarious, and carousing mood" had taken "possession of [the] main lobby"--a fact that should have alerted hotel management "to the anticipation that the revolving door would not only be subjected to excessive use but also that it would be likely to receive rough usage and unseemly abuse" ("ALIRD," 1354). Poor Mrs. Schubart was the victim of "a couple of young fellows" who, in a carousing mood, entered one of the door's compartments all together and gave "a big or extra hard push" ("ALIRID," 1354). So much for that hopeful Van Kannel vision of sociality inscribed in the door's design.
But even when no accidents occurred and no bodies were bruised, bent, or broken, there still remained a sense in which the revolving door might be thought an instrument of a certain kind of violence. This door which, Van Kannel said, "never needs closing, [yet] cannot be left open" was also "a mechanical paradox," and by the time Blanchard wrote his treatise, the company motto had been amended to "Always Open, Always Closed" (AWVK, 94; emphasis added). For while it may be true that the revolving door outdoes all other entrance mechanisms in safeguarding the boundary between inside and out, there is another point of view from which it opens up that boundary, giving movement across it a fluidity no other door can match. "Persons on first hearing of the new door," Van Kannel wrote, "often fall into the error of underrating its capacity for passage, supposing it will not permit as many persons to pass in and out in a given time as the old style storm doors" ("MEPA"). But the revolving door "keeps the in-going and out-going streams of passengers separated, thus allowing one solid stream to pass in and another out without collisions" ("MEPA"). Notwithstanding the inspired abuse to which geniuses like Coppola or Chaplin have submitted it, the device in its normal working groove converts human bodies into these "solid streams" of traffic, then condenses those streams back into isolated particles, each of which is encased, as if on display, behind plate glass for the instant or two it takes the door to spin. Though in one way more fluid, passage into and out of the building is also broken by this tiny hiatus, which the user spends in a vacuum-like "apart-ment." The fact that ambient noise is muffled during this brief delay tends to heighten the impact of entrance into and exit from the door. The moment of exit now comes as a release or, as in Crane's The Bridge, a rebirth, after the user has been "boxed alone."
The revolving door's appearance of being a machine for breaking down and reconstituting individuals "cut to size" is strongly suggested by King Vidor's The Crowd , a film that bemoans the dehumanizing effects of the modern city but also replicates them in the assembly-line manner in which it furnishes its hero and heroine. The office workers John and Mary are elevated to the status of protagonists only by virtue of their utter typicality: give me any two of this teeming mass, Vidor seems to say, and I will build my story around them. The couple is first brought together for a blind date that commences at the close of business hours. The sequence begins when John joins a line of men awaiting their dates of the evening on the sidewalk across from the Van Kannel doors of the building where Mary works. Spinning and releasing individual women with the apparent randomness of a lottery canister, the revolving door here marks the boundary between the new paper-pushing, service-economy workday and a leisure-time, heterosexual economy whose processes hark back to old-fashioned factory production. Each revolution of the office building's door pumps out one unit of female product, straight onto the arm of a waiting escort ( 5). This curbside dispensary of womankind manufactures straight couples with near-perfect efficiency, producing but few "surplus goods." (Vidor briefly disrupts the workings of this compulsory-heterosexuality machine by isolating a couple of women who, "dateless," emerge from the revolving door, pay no attention to the men waiting on the curb, and go off together. Only by producing a Mary out of the revolving door, to go with his John, can Vidor proceed to the task of producing his own narrative, which now begins to spin as briskly, from date to marriage to consequences, as a Van Kannel "pioneer" when pushed by a hurried user. Like the door--like the turning film reel on which Vidor spins his story--the narrative of The Crowd describes a circular motion, bringing its couple back around again to their starting point. Chastened by the many sufferings he endures throughout the film, John winds up happy to accept the job of street clown which he and Mary had once laughingly, and literally, looked down upon, from the upper deck of the bus that bore them away on their first date. In his end is his beginning.
Films like The Crowd secured the revolving door's identification with the new American world of skyscrapers, commerce, and clerks. In Europe, where "prior to World War II, the commercial high-rise was unknown," Van Kannel's creation found its natural habitat not in the American-style "cathedral of commerce"--the label given to Woolworth's Gothic tower of 1913--but in the very different precincts of the Grand Hotel. 28 In F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924) the circular door is, if geometry will permit the phrase, squarely at the center of the tale, first pathetic, then comic, of an aging doorman who finds himself abruptly demoted to washroom attendant and then, as if in recompense, suddenly made a millionaire to be waited upon by every employee of the institution that once degraded him.
Two settings divide Murnau's movie between them: the hotel where the doorman labors and the working-class neighborhood in which he lives. Conductor of human traffic into and out of the hotel, he is also the film's humble Hermes, the only character who can take us from the one environment to the other, traversing the whole social system whose classes are otherwise so morally invisible to each other. The uniqueness of his Dickensian capacity to connect the estranged segments of society is signaled by the fact that he wears his doorman's uniform not only on the job, where it is a badge of service, but all the way home as well, where it is magically transformed into a mantle of authority: the doorman strolls his neighborhood like a benevolent ruler, waving benignly, comforting hurt children, deferred to by everyone. The Drehtür (revolving door) he presides over at work becomes the emblem of this man who "makes the rounds" of a fragmented society.
Murnau's revolving door is, like Vidor's, part dehumanizing machine, part re for the medium in which he works, part wheel of fortune. On the day the hotel decides to replace him with a younger man, the old employee walks to work as usual, enters the Van Kannel door, and finds himself looking into the distorted mirror of his fate (. 6-9). The impersonal system that dispenses with his services has unceremoniously ousted him in favor of a new and improved cog, that erect and impassive re whom Murnau places in motion on the opposite side of the revolving door exactly as the older one enters it. In this brilliant piece of staging, the old doorman's professional [Begin Page 575] talisman turns against him, and, pathetically, his first impulse is to try to turn it back: having passed into the hotel interior as his replacement has headed out to the curb, he now makes a feeble push backward against the momentum of the door, as if he could undo his fate the same way one might wind back a reel of film. His young usurper does not re at all in the narrative: he is just the individual who happened to get the job, and he just happens to pass by at that moment; but Murnau's dazzling sequence suggests that Van Kannel's social ideal of a silent partnership of strangers has been exchanged for the harsh vision of society as a zero-sum game, all individual relationships corrupted into various forms of unequal competition, all success gained at another's expense.
In Murnau, what is initially felt as the mere coincidence of two men's movements turns into the violence done by an alienated social order to its faceless functionaries. In the deliriously gratifying conclusion of The Last Laugh, the dehumanizing mechanism spins the other way: through the revolving door the former wage slave now emerges as a new and pampered hotel guest. In a similar spirit, a memorable passage in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim uses the Van Kannel door to strike a blow for all downtrodden and dependent workers, making it the tool of the title character's anarchic retribution against his thoughtlessly cruel, cruelly thoughtless superior, Professor Welch, for whom temporary lecturers are as interchangeable as hotel doormen. The passage begins as Jim Dixon leaves his oppressor at the entrance to the college library:
Dixon turned away, only to start violently and look back as a loud thundering noise broke out behind him. Welch, his hair flapping, was straining like a packed-down rugby forward to push the revolving door in the wrong direction. Dixon stood and watched, allowing his mandrill face full play. After a time Welch, somehow divining his error, began pulling instead at the now-jammed door, changing his semblance to that of anchor in a losing tug-o'-war team. With a sudden bursting click the door yielded and Welch overbalanced backwards, hitting his head on the panel behind him. Dixon went away, beginning to whistle his Welch tune in a solemn, almost liturgical tempo. He felt that it was things like this that kept him going. 29
In other instances of the Grand Hotel paradigm, the Van Kannel door may stake no special claim to identification as a weapon of class struggle, but functions as a more or less benign re for the changeful and aleatory nature of life. This broadly "democratic" vision, with its pacifying message that all are subject to the turns of fortune's wheel, was perhaps an especially palatable one for American audiences of the early Depression era, and it res most prominently in Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel , an MGM production that puts this distinctly American spin on the Continental idea of the revolving door. The film, which is set in 1920s Berlin, gains access to this generalized viewpoint on life by focusing not on a single member of the subordinate class but on an ensemble of characters, most of them guests, who pass through the hotel and move into and out of various forms of relationship with each other. In its extended final sequence, set in the hotel lobby, Grand Hotel makes Van Kannel's invention the definitively human doorway, the mortal portal, expressing with every revolution the mutability of earthly existence.
Koolhaas clearly has Goulding's work in mind when he observes:
In the thirties--when the second Waldorf is being built--the "Hotel" becomes Hollywood's favorite subject. In a sense, it relieves the scriptwriter of the obligation of inventing a plot. A Hotel is a plot--a cybernetic universe with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere. It offers a fertile cross section through the population, a richly textured interface between social castes, a field for the comedy of clashing manners and a neutral background of routine operations to give every incident dramatic relief. With the Waldorf, the Hotel itself becomes such a movie, featuring the guests as stars and the personnel as a discreet coat-tailed chorus of extras. . . . The movie begins at the revolving door [though it much more strikingly ends with it]--symbol of the unlimited surprises of coincidence . . . 30
In his promotional booklet for the Van Kannel company, Robert Blanchard supplies one characterization of the inventor and his revolutionary door that comes close to anticipating the chief effects of Goulding's film.
Here, in the Riviera Palace Hotel, the elite of the world pass through Van Kannel doors. How many thousands have come through this door at the beginning of a new day, buoyed up with the thought that today was the day of success. How many have plodded wearily back in the late hours of the night, after the casino had closed, sadder, but seldom wiser. Yet some there are who swing through with light step. Winners for the day! And wise old Van Kannel admits them all, giving each, winner and loser alike, the faultless service for which [his door] is constructed. ( AWVK , 15)
"Wise old Van Kannel" is rather darkly impersonated in GrandHotel by the character of Doctor Otternschlag (Lewis Stone), the genius loci of the circular lobby that is the primary space in this circular film. A resident of the hotel, he keeps his station through all the arrivals and departures charted in the movie, arrivals and departures both literal and metaphoric (the film records one death, one birth). He is given, for good measure, a face half blackened by wartime injury, so as to identify him all the more plainly as Janus, the two-faced god of doorways. His closing line in the movie repeats his opening one--"people come, people go; nothing ever happens"--as the revolving door, spinning almost continuously throughout the closing sequence, becomes his Ixion's wheel. Doctor Otternschlag is Hollywood's Continental philosopher, its minor Nietzsche for the inter-war years: deadened and detached before the human comedy, he stands in stark contrast to the vigorous, newly-married American couple that arrives and pushes its way through the revolving door just after the many corrupt, disabled, or deluded Europeans have passed out of it (. 10, 11).
In the fifty-year span I have traced here, Theophilus Van Kannel's most famous invention established itself not only as a definitive feature of urban experience but also as a particularly rich and flexible trope. All sorts of repetitive or alternating processes could be represented by means of it. On it could be focused all manner of social hopes and fears; in the glass panels of its quiet chambers subjectivity might glimpse itself anew. I propose to halt on the threshold of subsequent developments, which would [Begin Page 578] include the proliferation of the revolving door metaphor throughout contemporary life, a development especially notable in the discourses of government and public policy. Today an internet search of the phrase "revolving door" will turn up a dreary catalogue of journalistic and other reports on various suspect practices (as in the revolving door between the domains of politics and corporate lobbying) or distressingly recurring phenomena (as in the revolving door of jails, drug-treatment centers, and the like). Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the idea of being caught or trapped in the revolving door has come to express the conviction of Red-scared, bureaucratized, conspiracy-theoried publics that the modernist transparency of the revolving door is a lie, that the forces propelling our movements and shaping our world operate elsewhere, on some inaccessible, invisible plane. The sense of fear and vulnerability that has long circulated around the revolving door received its most notorious updating in the George Bush (senior) campaign's race-baiting ad of 1988 attacking Michael Dukakis's prison furlough program: that "stream of persons" Van Kannel had imagined was now turned into a flood of dark-skinned felons making their way out of lock-up and into our (white suburban) nightmares.
But I do not wish to end with this cynical soft-money spot, or with Doctor Otternschlag at his private Gate of Hell, uttering those bitter words akin to Dante's "Abandon every hope, all who enter here." It takes some effort of will to think ourselves outside the postmodern cage, back to an era when the revolving door could inspire feelings, not of despair or of jadedness, but of wonder and joy. Before reentering as I must the door of our own day, I want to pause in celebration of the perfect use made of Van Kannel's device in one last artistic medium, half a century ago. This was a form that, Chaplinesque, appeared capable, for a time, of endless recyclings without loss of vigor, of eternal returns to an enchanting Pandemonium whose victim just kept coming back for more ( 12). The door spins; Elmer Fudd stumbles in again; and the final word of "Rabbit of Seville" is Bugs the barber's "Next!"
James Buzard is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture," 1800--1918 Clarendon, 1993). He is currently writing Anywhere's Nowhere: Fictions of Auto-Ethnography in the United Kingdom (Princeton UP). He has always been drawn to revolving doors.
1. See Gretl Hoffmann, Doors: Excellence in International Design (London: George Godwin; New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977), and Val Clery, Doors (New York: Viking, 1978). The revolving door is not, or is barely, mentioned in: Tim Benton and Charlotte Benton, with Dennis Sharp, eds., Architecture and Design, 1890-1939: An International Anthology of Original Articles (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1975); Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Carl W. Condit, The Riseof the Skyscraper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, 1851-1945 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983); Paul Goldberger, The Skyscraper (New York: Knopf, 1981); Ada Louise Huxtable, The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1995); Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Hrant Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution and Economics (London: Newman Books, 1954); Bill Riseboro, Modern Architecture and Design: An Alternative History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983); Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969); Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990); Alistair Service, Edwardian Architecture: A Handbook to Building Design in Britain, 1890-1914 (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977); Joseph Siry, Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988); John Summerson, The Turn of the Century: Architecture in Britain around 1900 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1976); Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dalco, Modern Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979); Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field and Co., 1852-1906 (New York: Arno Press, 1976); Marcus Whiffen, American Architecture Since 1780 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969). A Heckscher Museum exhibit entitled Windows and Doors (Huntington, New York, 30 Jan-19 March, 1972) featured no images of revolving doors. Albert Haberer's Doors and Gates (London: Iliffe Books, 1952; 6th ed. 1964) contains only three images of revolving doors and no design drawings for them, though it contains design drawings for almost every other imaginable type of door.
2. Elaine Scarry, "The Railway Emergency Brake: The Use of Analogy in Legal and Political Argument" (unpublished typescript), 2.
3. Richard Sennett, "Plate Glass," Raritan: A Quarterly Review 6.4 (Winter 1987): 15. I have altered Sennett's phrase from "inherent ambiguity" here.
4. Sennett, "Plate Glass": 15.
5. A copy of Van Kannel's original patent and of the materials pertaining to the award of the John Scott medal were kindly provided to me by the curatorial department of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
6. This quotation and other information on the early history of the revolving door is derived from Harvey E. Van Kannel and Joanne Fox Marshall's unpublished, copyrighted edition of T. Van Kannel, The Inventor: His Autobiography and Journal, 2 vols. (Oak Ridge, Tenn., 1988), in the Library of Congress. The long quotation is in the appendix to volume 2.
7. By 1900, the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company, headquartered in the Fuller Building at 23rd Street and Broadway in New York, was operating internationally, with branch offices in Paris and Berlin, and holding patents in many European countries. The spread of the Van Kannel door in Europe was somewhat delayed, however, by various restrictions there on building heights: the London Building Act of 1894, for instance, set a limit of 30 meters, and without very tall structures (and banks of elevators) the desirability of the Van Kannel door could not so readily be perceived. See Lee Polisano, "Complexity and Contrast: American and European High-Rise Buildings," Reaching for the Skies: Architectural Design Profile 116 : 30-35.
8. For a revisionist perspective on architectural history, one that emphasizes the continuities rather than the disjunction between Victorian and modernist methods, see James A. Schmiechen, "The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism," American Historical Review 93.2 (April 1988): 287-316.
9. "The Van Kannel Storm Door: 'Always Closed': A Mechanical Paradox," an unpaginated promotional leaflet included among the materials in the Franklin Institute's file pertaining to the 1889 award of the John Scott Legacy medal to Van Kannel. Henceforth abbreviated as "MEPA".
10. See Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well- Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 73-74.
11. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall(Boston: Little Brown, n.d.; first ed. 1929), 159-60.
12. Van Kannel Revolving Door Company, "General Information: Revolving Doors: Always Closed" (n.d.), 36. Henceforth abbreviated as "GENIN".
13. Robert L. Blanchard, Around the World with Van Kannel (New York: Van Kannel Revolving Door Company, 2nd ed. 1930), 7. Henceforth cited in the text as AWVK.
14. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A. H. H.," in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 484.
15. Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 74.
16. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 100.
17. Hart Crane, The Bridge, Part VII, in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Webber (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), 108-9.
18. Gregory G. Sarno, "Annotation: Liability for Injuries in Connection with Revolving Door on Nonresidential Premises," 93 ALR 3rd 132 (henceforth "ALICRD"); F. G. Madara, "Annotation: Liability for Injury by Revolving Door," 169 ALR 1346 (henceforth "ALIRD").
19. Provo v. Toledo Trust Co. , 60 Ohio App. 82; 19 NE 2nd 520.
20. William Lloyd Prosser and W. Page Keeton, Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th ed. (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1984), 682.
21. Prosser, 682.
22. United States Patent Office, Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, "Storm-Door Structure," Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 387,571, 7 August, 1888, 2.
23. United States Patent Office, "Storm-Door Structure," 7 August, 1888, 1.
24. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 68.
25. Van Kannel's vision of the future is entitled "In 100 Years from Now, and the Year A.D. 2001" and included in Harvey E. Van Kannel and Joanne Fox Marshall, eds., T. Van Kannel, The Inventor: His Autobiography and Journal, Vol. 1, A2-A19. Any parent or childcare provider can probably describe at length the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of using the revolving door when in the company of small children. Do you put them in your compartment, and risk tripping over them, because in this position you can better protect them against sudden lurches caused by other users?
26. Quoted in David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 169; emphasis in original.
27. Some relevant cases include: Nersiff v. Worcester County Institute for Savings, 1928 ("ALIRD," 1351); Eyerly v. Baker, 1935 ("ALIRD," 1352); Sterns v. Highland Hotel Co., 1940 ("ALIRD," 1356); Dunn v. First National Bank, 1935 ("ALIRD," 1356).
28. Polisano, "Complexity and Contrast," 30. Its absence, Polisano argues, may be traced to a fundamental difference between European and American economic strategies: European nations opted to reduce domestic competition by forming large syndicates or cartels that would "co-ordinate investment, share capital and benefit from government support;" in the U.S., where a strong distrust of government prerogatives prevailed, mergers of private companies gave rise to numerous very large ones controlling sizeable pools of capital and requiring vast areas of office space in the commercial centers. Kenneth Turney Gibbs links the emergence of the skyscraper more specifically to the "meteoric rise of life insurance in the business world" after the Civil War. The Equitable Life Assurance Co. was "the first corporation bold enough to undertake a great office building in connection with its own necessary place of business:" its headquarters, constructed in 1868-1870, was also the first to have a passenger elevator. See Gibbs, Business Architectural Imagery in America, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 25.
29. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (orig. 1953; New York: Viking, 1958), 179.
30. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 148-50.
Perhaps no question has proved as vexing as the troubled relationship between modernism and popular culture. It is a commonplace to note that modernist works of art were tireless in citing items drawn from the popular, whether it was Picasso's inclusion of popular song titles (e.g., Ma jolie), Joyce's complex reworkings of music hall in Ulysses, or Weill's adaptations of contemporary jazz in Die Dreigroschenoper. This essay considers the context of T.S. Eliot's 1923 memorial essay for music-hall singer Marie Lloyd, the most celebrated performer of English variety entertainment, and attempts to unpack the specific meanings compressed in Eliot's invocation of the popular. His use of that term cannot be properly interpreted, nor can relations between English modernism and the popular be fully grasped, unless we situate these phenomena within the larger context of the processes which constitute authority in modernity.
Our standard readings of Eliot's essay miss the tensions that inform it. 1 This is partly because they rush to confirm some pre-conception of the popular, but chiefly because they neglect a considerable corpus of late Victorian and Edwardian discourse that addressed the English popular and shaped Eliot's understanding of it. The popular elaborated by Eliot in 1923 had specific historical ties to the culture of the Victorian professional-managerial classes. Late-Victorian literati addressed the popular via the events taking place on the stages of London's many music-halls, events which their discourse on the halls linked to a larger narrative about English national character and history. These representations of music-hall provide a background indispensable to understanding a notion of the popular which Eliot knew and endeavored to further, even as he reconred it. Taken together they formed a discourse which repeatedly lamented music hall's imminent decline. Tracing its contours will enable us to specify more fully that version of the popular which preoccupied Eliot and Anglo-American modernism.
Recent attempts to explore modernism and the popular have often relied on two sources, Eliot's essay "Marie Lloyd" and T. J. Clark's gloss on it. 2 And rightly so. Clark's reading of Eliot rests on a profound grasp of the popular's historical derivation within the rise of commodity culture. In his remarkable book, The Painting of Modern Life, he pinpoints the origins of the popular in a class-based discourse. The modern popular has two prerequisites for its crystalization. First, there must be a prevalent working-class cultural form (the café-chantant in France, for example), one which is being developed into a full-scale, commercial leisure enterprise, appropriated and standardized by business-minded entrepreneurs and impresarios. The popular is built on working-class culture which is on the verge of becoming the commercial culture of urban and industrial capital.
Second, the making of the popular as a discursive realm also requires the active presence of a bourgeois subject acting in a manner hitherto mostly unacknowledged by later historical accounts. The popular, in this view, receives its shape and definition from a curious, intrusive fraction of the middle-class, one more interested in artistic production or conspicuous consumption than investment, thrift, or moral convention. 3 These middle-class cognoscenti patronized the popular and represented it in painting and aesthetic discourse, representations which neither elaborate nor instantiate the popular, but obfuscate it. The popular, in Clark's account, is a fiction forged to confiscate the new-found authority of working-class performers and their culture; it is an interpretation which contains the working-class character of the popular and conceals the core of class difference that remains in a social world privileging the spectacle of social mobility over its reality.
Clark's insight, that the popular had a mid-Victorian genesis, and was a discourse of incipient professional authority, of a new class of salaried burghers intent on pursuing an aristocratic cultural hedonism, is a precondition for understanding how Eliot responded to English music-hall in the "London Letters" which he wrote for The Dial and how he defined and dissected the popular in "Marie Lloyd." But does Clark's reconstructed popular describe the same object which Eliot is expounding? Partly. The growth of the London music-hall paralleled the development and expansion of the Parisian café-chantant. And by the late 1880s, with the growth of suburban variety-theater, London music-hall was on the verge of losing its exclusive working-class character and gaining a new, more upscale market demographic. Critics, artists, marketers, promoters, and social scientists competed with the belletristic observers of music-hall to represent it; they largely believed--though some of them were also alarmed by it--that a new mass culture entertainment had come to represent the national character and attained a role in forging the national temper. 4 Many of these observers, whether literati or social scientists, belonged to the rank of the new professional classes, trained workers who saw their authority based on their education rather than inheritance or financial holdings. They believed their observations of the effects and significance of mass culture constituted work for the public weal; it was their duty to sift whatever was good from the otherwise degraded mass character of urban leisure forms. For some of them, music-hall was valuable simply because it seemed to make visible the specific nature of English identity, or because it was thought that music-hall had achieved a national character in terms of its influence and range. Here was a distinctively English art.
Eliot was clearly moved by the English popular, intrigued by that account which cultured cognoscenti had fashioned to assess the broad significance of London music-hall and its popularity. Ronald Schuchard deems Eliot the last heir of aesthete musings on music-hall. 5 The writings of critic and poet Arthur Symons on music-hall; the wry, sophisticated, and contradictory appreciations of the entertainment by Max Beerbohm; the images of music-hall and its audiences by Walter Sickert; and the vision of music-hall as vital vulgarity distilled in the poetry of John Davidson--all these encouraged Eliot to seek content for poetry as well as subjects for his essays in the halls. 6 Schuchard amply shows how earlier writings on music-hall influenced Eliot as both a poet and cultural observer, and his observations broadly support Clark's account of an Eliot who was influenced by the very concept of the popular which he was simultaneously attempting to interpret. 7
That said, Clark seems to deny Eliot the kind of self-conscious distance towards the fiction of the popular that later critics appear to maintain. He quotes approvingly from Eliot's indictment of the English bourgeois in the essay on "Marie Lloyd." "I have called [Lloyd] the expressive re of the lower classes. There is no such expressive re for any other class. The middle classes have no such idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt." 8 Yet on Clark's own terms, Eliot's polemic cannot be taken at face value. Likewise, the single minded notion of class which Eliot seemingly propounds cannot be taken as the measure of Eliot's insight. Surely Eliot could take up the kind of reflexive stance which was entailed in the conceptual understanding of class relations that the popular provided. The concept of the popular which is safeguarded in this passage boasts a complex history of usage, of which Eliot was well aware. Given that awareness, could he really continue to believe in a totalized bourgeois class? Or that music-hall was working-class culture made flesh and maintained in its essence? If the popular exists largely as discursive mode, it exists primarily as a social construct which has been assembled of varied parts. It is difficult to be fully convinced by Clark's image of a lumpen culture in its "original consistency," a pure signifier of working-class culture existing prior to and utterly divorced from the middle-class construct of the popular (POML, 230). 9 Such claims insinuate that performers like Marie Lloyd represent the popular solely on the basis of birth, a point that would not set well, one imagines, with either Clark or Eliot. Too many questions are finally left unanswered. Why does Eliot's essay so signally fail to define its lead concept, the popular? Why does Lloyd's death create what Eliot considers to be a shift in the delicate equilibrium of the social and moral order? Why does Eliot entertain the idea that it constitutes a tragic moment for the social order if music-hall is replaced by Hollywood cinema? After all, wouldn't the terms of the popular, as Clark understands them, have remained just as secure?
In Eliot's essay on "Marie Lloyd," the end of vital music-hall is made to signify something like that favored modernist trope of crisis, the end of art. Mass culture, instead, denotes mass produced art which is disseminated by means of "electrical ingenuity," or cinema and radio broadcasts ("ML," 173), and it will lead to the wholesale destruction of proletarian moral fiber because those media foster fundamentally passive responses to art and destroy the "natural" tendency of the working-class to collaborate in aesthetic production. Mass culture means credulous, lazy, and corrupted spectators; the end of proletarian culture by necessity imperils the nation, since the working-class represent, in Eliot's words, "that part of the nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest"("ML," 172).
This sort of talk--the abstraction of a vital and guileless people, the equally totalized notion of "technology" which mobilizes Eliot's disdain--sums up much that exasperates us about modernist discourse. Yet, "Marie Lloyd" is more than a programmatic modernist stand on "the people": it also introduces a complex notion of mediation into its rhetoric of the popular. Among music-hall performers, Eliot maintains, Lloyd was "the strongest" due to her "hold on popular affection," a hold attributed to "her understanding of the people and sympathy with them, and the people's recognition of the fact that she embodied the virtues which they genuinely most respected in private life"("ML," 173). Eliot values Lloyd both for her labor and her essence, for both "represent[ing] and express[ing]" the working-class, a statement that works over, I will argue, a major tension between these terms as Eliot understood them. Further, Lloyd's relationship to her audience is one in which she stands as an idealized version of the poet and critic vis-à-vis the community. "Representation," therefore, becomes a more complicated, mediated, and self-reflexive process than Clark's reading of Eliot or the popular would allow. If Marie Lloyd stands in for the critic in this new social compact, it emphasizes the collaborative work of representation and the corporate nature of the popular itself, which is now seen to be forged from partial views and responses moving across class boundaries. The bourgeois incapacity for self-representation, so damned in Eliot's barbed comments, has left Lloyd as a proxy for the intellectual.
Eliot's insistence that a working-class woman represents the popular is important. He is always aware that Lloyd is both representative and his representative, a status which runs against the grain of prevailing aesthetic practice. For Eliot's contemporaries, aesthetic codes were assumed to function on a single plane, within a clearly marked terrain. Protocols of aesthetic value and judgment invite cultural participants to learn from models of excellence that exist either within one's horizon, or just above it--and for "horizon," one has history's sanction to read "class." Tracing his appreciation for Lloyd, Eliot anticipates a key condition of our contemporary affective lives, insofar as modernity is actualized and achieved in the search for proxies of the inner life over, under and across social hierarchies, rather than on the horizontal plane of status.
Eliot's alarm at the prospect that music-hall will give way to cinema may seem excessive. But his anxiety stems in part from his awareness that a received conceptualization of the popular was no longer fully convincing for an increasing number of intellectuals. In that conceptualization, London music-hall was deemed a mass cultural form which could be redeemed by discerning critics insofar as they discerned its peculiar capacity to mirror Englishness. In "Marie Lloyd," Eliot mourns not just a singer, but also the premature end of just this discourse of professional authority, much as Clark's argument suggests. However, what Clark has called "terrible fiction" (POML, xxvi) of the English popular did not follow a single formula, but a much looser logic in which the popular was made to dovetail with the recognition--or the production--of persistent traits of national character, versions of venerable and pedigreed Englishness.
"Marie Lloyd" presents two strands of the popular which maintain a troubled co-existence. One is a sentimental strand of populism in which class is abrogated in order to create novel aesthetic protocols for a brave new class of culture managers and administrators. Yet, this "modernist popular," to call it that, is kept under pressure by the weight of an accumulated discourse which insisted, always with an elegiac note, that music-hall had accommodated the very essence of the nation, that it epitomized the national popular. Under the influence of this view, Eliot adopted some of its grammar and syntax to contain the novel experience of mass culture.
Much of "Marie Lloyd" is taken up with Eliot's anxiety that the national popular is being displaced by the new global popular, or put another way, that a commodity form is crowding out a unique cultural heritage, one which is in some sense timelessly English. In part the essay's apocalyptic tenor reflects a critical mind exploring the limits of an inherited concept of the popular, one which had commercial music-hall, without obvious contradiction, appear to stand outside commodity culture in the mind of the cultural élite. In part it reflects a latent fear that the class of culture pundits who had tutored the poet in the popular, a class which was itself of relatively recent date, would no longer be authorized to define which cultural forms were truly significant. The new global popular, represented by radio and cinema, stood for genuine and degraded mass culture in a way that the discursive music-hall, worked over and transformed by these thinking élites, did not.
The inchoate quality of the memorial stems from Eliot's unconscious struggle with a previous discoursive strain, leaving his new insights tentative. "Marie Lloyd" bridges the shift from one version of the popular, articulated by intellectuals in a mode which binds the popular to the nation, to a trans-national mode of the popular. Modernism, or at least that version of it which Eliot articulated, validated these earlier observations on the popular which had been derived from the English music-hall experience and built up by experts who had a stake in articulating a national community. That new managerial or professional class had relied on the authority that resided in national images to anchor its own claims to expertise.
The discursive tradition on which Eliot was drawing exhibited sufficient form and thematic cohesion that it might well be called a genre--or at least a sub-genre, one that we might name the "music-hall lament." The lament's key traits are elaborated in several contemporary essays on the music-hall. Music-hall, these generic essays argued, could be best understood if situated within a specific story detailing English national history and the presumed continuity of English character. The lament assumes aspects of music-hall that its audiences might neglect; it posits music-hall as a complexly significant ritual, requiring lay-persons to lean on aficionados for their guidance and tutelage through the interpretive maze. Many of these late-Victorian and Edwardian essays were overtly pessimistic, the halls were in danger of losing their authenticity, of succumbing to decadence. The lament also served a pedagogical function for a bourgeois readership; it encouraged them to see music-hall and mass culture correctly, as intellectuals saw it; and it permitted critical intellectuals to assume a tutelary role toward a public which was supposed to follow the delicate discriminations of experts which were required to maintain the production of the popular.
The genre first appears in 1893 with "The Pedigree of the Music-hall," an essay which art critic and scholar Elizabeth R. Pennell published in the English journal The Contemporary Review. 10 Pennell traces the rise of a communal art form that produced singers, comics, and entertainers who reflected the working-class audiences which came to the early halls. That form, Pennell warns, is already being threatened by the newer variety theaters which are suitable for family audiences. It is in danger of losing the common touch, the vulgarity that for discerning middle-class observers like Pennell has constituted its value and grounded its authentic character.
To defend music-hall, Pennell adopts a paradoxical strategy: this "modern institution" is given an almost timeless, natural origin. 11 "If the music-hall be a modern institution, the entertainment it provides is the heirloom of centuries. There is not a turn which is new" ("PMH," 580). English theater may have originated in the miracle play, as so often asserted, but music hall was even older. "Before the Miracle Play had been invented, the people of England had clamoured for variety entertainment, and been given it. There was not a castle throughout the land that had not its own special London Pavilion or Alhambra in miniature" ("PMH," 575). The analogies escalate in a rhetorical pile-up: "And the other turns boast a pedigree as illustrious and as long. Acrobats and jugglers, bears and dogs, by the same feats and the same tricks--you can see them in illuminated MSS. And old wood-cuts held Saxon and Norman spell-bound, as they hold the Cockney today. Not one number of the programme could be cited which has not its medieval counterpart. More of the past lives in the music hall than in any other modern institution" ("PMH," 583). Music hall, in short, uniquely embodies the national character.
Pennell's sketch of music-hall history authenticates the form, yet closes on an ominous note. "For centuries Englishmen have been shaping their variety entertainment into its present form, and now, like a child with the toy it has been crying for, they are doing their best to destroy it" ("PMH," 583). The sudden shift in tone, though momentarily jarring, forms part of her larger project. Although her historical account of music hall effectively compacts it into a uniform expression of national identity, it is conspicuously directed to a public distinct from the people supposedly represented by or even involved in music hall's production. In fact, she complains about "proprietors and managers, working men patrons and artistes," all of whom "protest that the variety show is a great moral force, an educational factor, a safeguard against intemperance" ("PMH," 583). This view defends music hall on the ground that it is compatible with or faithful to middle-class standards. But the popular is something which most middle-class citizens either neglected or disdained. It requires an expert to savor, to study, and, finally, to preserve its popular essence. "Evidently, its days are numbered," Pennell sighs. Yet all is not lost: "When too late, when it is no longer studied at first hand, the scholar will learn its value" ("PMH," 583). Here is the paradox of a popular whose authoritative status is sanctioned not by the people, but by those qualified and trained to recognize the workings of history and culture. Pennell's account deftly introduces the tone of elegy and links it to an argument for the need for critical experts on the popular. The future of music-hall, and of culture writ large, is in the hands of this managerial élite, whom Pennell wishes to empower, to preserve the form.
Pennell can be said to have originated the music-hall lament; dandy and critic Max Beerbohm had the honor of codifying it. Beerbohm, having replaced George Bernard Shaw as critic for the Saturday Review, covered the turn-of-the-century London theater and music-hall scene. He focussed on music-hall in a series of reflective and complexly deliberate essays, which took up and further elaborated Pennell's homology between the entertainment and national character. 12 The elegiac note was sounded more powerfully: music hall, he thought, was threatened by its commercial success. It had to be saved by connoisseurs who would provide professional guidance to a public they would both address and construct.
Of all the music-hall acolytes, Beerbohm best exemplifies the generous inclusiveness, and the decided limits, which characterized late Victorian concepts of the popular. His admiration of the form is expansive, but also committed to maintaining the superior stance of the critical observer. His ironic tone never conceals his deep affection; rather, it results in double-voiced statements, elevated praise mixed with waspish barbs.  His evaluative claims subtly calibrate differences between trained and untrained observers, yet also keep notions of aesthetic distinction and elevation intact. His ambiguous commendations simultaneously exalt the halls and claim possession of a specific version of music hall, one which requires a critical discernment to be appreciated.
These discrete claims tend to function to a single effect: the elevation of discerning partisans over untrained onlookers. The ironic partisan can best apprehend ties between music-hall performance and authentic working-class character, ties lost on the mere spectator. In "The Older and Better Music-hall" , Beerbohm muses on music hall's growing commercial success and the appropriation of the "popular" and "vulgarity" which it seemingly entails. Such success may well represent a crisis for the form, but it is also an opportunity for the critic. For "a keen soul" presented with an art in decline there are several choices. Either "the soul lives in the future, the art lagging behind" or "the soul lives in the past, left behind by the art." 13 Beerbohm left no doubts about his own position. "In the matter of music-halls, I am already a staunch, even a passionate reactionary," he states, announcing his "dislike [of] the fashion that now dominates not merely the specific palace of varieties but also such places as the Pavilion, the Tivoli, and even that titular home of lost causes and impossible loyalties, the Oxford" ("OBMH," 384)
"The Older and Better Music-hall" ends with hope for the future, provided readers heed the critic's call to action: "Can we recapture the olden pleasure? Indeed yes. I have found a place. Let me guide you to it" ("OBMH," 383). What follows is a description of singer Harry Freeman, whose performance style lacks the refinement of the newer palaces of variety. "Let us go to it [the Metropolitan] often, magically renewing there our youth. And in those dreary other halls let us nevermore set foot" ("OBMH," 385). Beerbohm privileges the older, less assimilated music-hall partly because he thinks it genuinely better, but partly because it allows discerning observers to recognize and appreciate the lineaments of national tradition in its unprocessed vulgarity. "This is one of the advantages of the old music-hall over the new," he declares: "it does reflect, in however grotesque a way, the characters of the class to which it consciously appeals" ("OBMH," 384). The essay's sophisticated and ironic partisanship becomes evidence of keen discrimination among various cultural goods, bolstering Beerbohm's self-presentation as music-hall aficionado. His middle-class readers, likewise, are solicited to vote with their feet in the cultural marketplace, to patronize a cultural form which the critic has termed "grotesque," but also "older" and "better," and not merely the most fashionable, luxurious, or merely available. If Beerbohm lays claim to a possession of and makes common cause with expert rhetoric, his readers are invited to do the same, to fashion themselves as a taste élite.
Despite his condescension to the lumpen qualities he savors in music-hall, there is an expansive aspect to Beerbohm's often cautious praise for the form. His readers, he assumes, require guidance in negotiating a post-literate world, where images, song, and spectacle dominate ever more extensive realms of common experience. The dulcet tones of traditional high culture may no longer suffice for advancing modernity, and this very doubt bolsters faith in a compensatory expertise and authority that can be achieved within the popular itself. The critic who works with and upon the popular thereby assumes a new service role to readers, training members of the dominant class in the special apprehension of minority culture. Getting popular culture right offers the interpreter a crucial edge over both the people and a majority of the public. Put another way, Beerbohm's lament for the fading, vulgar halls functions to put middle-class readers in touch with their inner aristocrat.
At this point, the music-hall lament touches on professional ideology. Since the popular has now been re-constituted as a knowledge source, it must be hoarded as symbolic capital, with access to the fund guarded. This parallels a step in the consolidation process of professional identity as it has been identified by Magali Larson. 14 At some point in the development of a profession, experts typically sustain their own identity by limiting the number of applicants who can be credentialed within a field. The exclusionary clause is usually aided by agencies outside the profession, often within the state. As a species of professional discourse, the music-hall lament includes an analogous moment when the critic looks outside his class / readership to consolidate the assertion of critical authority, looks instead to the concept or image of the nation to sanction their judgments of taste, and underwrites their rhetorical authority. Once English music-hall has been transformed into the "popular," and the popular has been legitimated as a valid kind of knowledge, its adepts require a concept of centralized authority to ensure their status. The nation does this by metonymy. Cognoscenti pay back the privilege by reading the varied content of the popular back into the national record.
Music-hall inhabited a relatively subordinate place within the larger culture; yet intellectuals seemed determined to claim and realize a far more central place for it. Theirs was an attempt to broaden the terrain encompassed by the cultural center; as a form of art and ritual, music hall would be endowed with depth and gravity befitting its resonance within English history. The late-Victorian compromise on the halls did not simply sneer at the vulgarity of music-hall, but rather worried over the meaning of vulgarity. In music-hall practice it hunted out hints of the form's deep significance, complex truths about national identity and history. Intellectuals, in return, could gain much from their traffic with music hall. Increasingly marginalized in bourgeois society by their advocacy of aesthetic value, they now endeavored to gain a measure of credibility by insisting on the need for a middle-class public to recognize value within the popular. In this regard, the English popular resembles Clark's Parisian variant; middle-class identity and authority are being consolidated by participating in and advocating popular entertainment. Yet the popular, as defined by Clark, does not dovetail perfectly with English circumstances. For in this instance, not only did the critic lay claim to a certain discursive power, but the ways in which the very notions of critical authority and hegemony could be formulated were subtly transformed.